I doubt that religious bigotry, as such, has much to with it–though anti-Muslim sentiment, at least, is on the rise in Scandinavia, as in much of Europe. Rather, what we’re seeing is a clash of values between a secular worldview that has little patience for traditional religious expression, and the followers of the traditional religions themselves. To put it bluntly, the secular human rights community finds it increasingly difficult to take seriously the arguments traditional religion puts forward, especially when sex is somehow involved.

Here’s an example. Last week, The Copenhagen Post ran an op-ed by Morten Frisch, a doctor and sex researcher who favors a ban. Circumcision, Frisch writes, is problematic not only because it violates a boy’s bodily integrity when he is too young to consent. (Actually, any medical treatment would present that problem). What’s really bad is that circumcision decreases sexual pleasure later in life. “To most Europeans,” Frisch writes, “circumcision is an ethically problematic ritual that is intrinsically harmful to children: every child has the right to protection of his or her bodily integrity and the right to explore and enjoy his or her undiminished sexual capacity later in life.”

What about the fact that Judaism and Islam have required male circumcision for millennia? Isn’t that a factor to consider? You might think that practices that have lasted thousands of years come with some presumption of validity, even if you disagree with them. Millions of people across time have thought such practices important, even sacred. Frisch summarily dismisses these concerns. “Religious arguments,” he writes, “must never trump the protection of children’s basic human rights. To cut off functional, healthy parts of other people’s bodies without their explicit and well-informed consent can never be anybody’s right–religious or otherwise.”

Several things:

1) This illustrates the point that commenter Thursday, and others, keep making here: that the claim frequently made by secular liberals that their worldview is values-neutral and therefore more just is a sham. It’s not that secular liberals are morally wrong in any of their particular claims, but only that they are wrong, and self-deceptive, to claim that their values are in any sense neutral. The idea above of “basic human rights” implies an objective concept of rights inherent to all humans. Where do these rights come from? Why do they not include the right to worship as one sees fit? Why should this conception of “human rights” be privileged above others? I don’t believe there is any such thing as a values-neutral polity, and I wouldn’t advocate for one, inasmuch as it cannot exist. But we really should get it straight in our heads what’s going on here, when we have this clash of visions. Liberals often flatter themselves that they are the open-minded, reasonable ones in these matters, when in fact they are every bit as dedicated to imposing a vision of the good on the polity as any Christian.

2) It is telling that the reason the Scandinavian doctor gives for suppressing traditional Jewish and Muslim practice is that it stands to decrease sexual pleasure later in life. Preserving the possibility for more intense male orgasms is more important than preserving the right of the Jewish and Muslim minority to follow the teachings of their ancient faiths. For many secular liberals, sexual freedom and pleasure is the summum bonum of life, and must be privileged above all else, including religious liberty. Denmark is simply taking what many American liberals believe to a logical conclusion. If you understand that sexual autonomy is at the heart of what many middle-class and upper-middle-class liberals consider to be the Good Life, it becomes easier to understand why they pursue the political and cultural agenda that they do.

3) Damon Linker, on the culture war and the political and cultural future of the US:

The liberal political theory that influenced and inspired America’s founders tells us that these disagreements shouldn’t be a problem. First devised in response to the bloody clashes of Europe’s religious civil wars, classical liberalism proposes that a modern, liberal nation can cohere around devotion to the ideals and institutions that make it possible for its citizens to live together freely and in peace, despite their differences about the highest human goods.

But is that really enough when the differences go so far beyond early modern Christian factionalism, to include disagreements about fundamental questions of life, love, sex, pleasure, family, and even the very nature of reality and meaning of existence? Is there any upward limit on how much cultural difference is compatible with national cohesion? How long are Americans stationed on different sides of our numerous cultural fissures likely to feel bound together with strangers who view the world so very differently — especially when each side increasingly treats the others with open contempt?

Can a nation of more than 310 million people bind itself together with little more than an attachment to the very institutions that permit and foster its cultural disunity?

Is there any upward limit on how much cultural difference is compatible with national cohesion? This is a terrific question, but it may not feel quite so pressing to most people now, because it is hard to imagine anything seriously challenging our basic cultural and political unity, however much we may grumble about the Other. But if my country should ever threaten my right to practice the fundamentals of my religion as Scandinavian countries are threatening their Jewish and Muslim citizens, it will become my enemy. That will not mean civil war, as it once did in the US, but if a significant number of Americans come to think of their government as an enemy of their faith — and I think this day is coming, in my lifetime — we will be living in interesting times.

On the other hand: I once met an African-American veteran of World War II who said that he fought proudly for America not because it was perfect — he came home to segregation — but because he believed in America’s ideals. He fought because he believed that American ideals were right and true, and that America simply had to be compelled to see that the way it treated its black citizens was a failure of the nation to be true to itself. That man had an enormous amount of moral courage and insight. How can any of us today be permitted the luxury of despair about America when a man who had to come home to real oppression maintained his faith in the promise of America, despite it all?

The difference, I think, is that there was back then a widely shared idea of the good society. That veteran fought because he agreed with what America stood for, and wanted to make America be faithful to the creed that nearly all Americans endorsed. Plus, in those days, there was a wide consensus around sexual norms, which, cruel though they could be to individuals, provided for relative social and cultural stability. And however far American society fell short, there was still a wide consensus around basic Judeo-Christian moral norms as ideals to which we should collectively and individually aspire. This is why the Civil Rights Movement, emerging out of the black church, was so successful: it forced America not only to face how it was failing itself by the way it treated its black citizens, but it forced Christians to see how they were failing their own deepest religious beliefs.

Those days are gone. We are post-Christian now, and post-Sexual Revolution. As Linker points out, we don’t even have fundamental agreement on many of the basics. In 1798, John Adams wrote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” What happens to an America whose people have grown far apart on what it means to be moral and religious?

Is it really the case that to cast off Christian teaching on sex and sexuality is to remove the factor that gives—or gave—Christianity its power as a social force?

Though he might not have put it quite that way, the eminent sociologist Philip Rieff would probably have said yes. Rieff’s landmark 1966 book The Triumph Of the Therapeutic analyzes what he calls the “deconversion” of the West from Christianity. Nearly everyone recognizes that this process has been underway since the Enlightenment, but Rieff showed that it had reached a more advanced stage than most people—least of all Christians—recognized.

Rieff, who died in 2006, was an unbeliever, but he understood that religion is the key to understanding any culture. For Rieff, the essence of any and every culture can be identified by what it forbids. Each imposes a series of moral demands on its members, for the sake of serving communal purposes, and helps them cope with these demands. A culture requires a cultus—a sense of sacred order, a cosmology that roots these moral demands within a metaphysical framework.

You don’t behave this way and not that way because it’s good for you; you do so because this moral vision is encoded in the nature of reality. This is the basis of natural-law theory, which has been at the heart of contemporary secular arguments against same-sex marriage (and which have persuaded no one).

Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the sexual revolution—though he did not use that term—as a leading indicator of Christianity’s death as a culturally determinative force. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, “the rejection of sexual individualism” was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture was at the core of Christian culture—a culture that, crucially, did not merely renounce but redirected the erotic instinct. That the West was rapidly re-paganizing around sensuality and sexual liberation was a powerful sign of Christianity’s demise.

In the past, Christian values were the cultural core around which American political life centered. In the emerging post-Christian order, Christian values are increasingly alien to American political life. This may cause less political discord than we think, given that so many Americans are deconverting from historical Christianity, and either leaving the faith altogether, or substituting the contentless, bourgeois, and ever-malleable Moralistic Therapeutic Deism for prophetic religion. It may be the case that believing Christians are destined to become a small and increasingly despised minority in the decades to come. In fact, this is what I expect. This is why I expect things like Scandinavian attacks on Jewish and Muslim religious life to become more common in the US in the decades to come. And this is why I expect that my grandchildren, if they somehow manage to be Christians, will more or less be enemies of the state. It has happened before.

UPDATE: Dear Anti-Circumcision Activists who don’t normally participate in this blog, please read the thread before you post. I have published several comments by you folks. I’ve stopped, because they all repeat the same script. The point has been made over and over.

248 Responses to Sexual Freedom As Secularist Sacrament

I too think the French and Russian Revolutions are bad examples and unlikely to happen here, thankfully. But something akin to the anti-clerical laws passed in France in the first decade of the 20th century or to Bismarck’s Kulturkampf? That seems not only possible, but likely. In fact, the Administration’s argument in Hosanna-Tabor struck me as very Bismarckian.

Re: Boys were purposefully de-sensitized to the need for privacy in this regard in order to prepare them for likely military service

I doubt that was it. Rather, lack of privacy around one’s own sex was the general rule going far, far back. There were public baths in just about every time and place where people bathed in the nude with other men or women. Visit Mt. Vernon sometime and notice the latrines (“George Washington, er, sat here”). One for men, one for the ladies– and both multi-seat facilities with no trace of privacy inside.
It’s we moderns that are the odd ones out in this respect, abetted by technology of course, and by a daintiness that the most prudish of our ancestors would have found effete.

what the foreskin confers is “a symphony of sensation” all the way from foreplay to orgasm, making the journey as important as the arrival – as it is for women. That probably has a lot to do with reputation of European men as great lovers.

Utter nonsensical babble. Considering how much circumcised men enjoy manual and oral stimulation, not to mention sex itself, there is no documented evidence – nor even any plausible evidence – that men who were circed in infancy grow up to experience less pleasure than those who were not.

As for European men – would this include the British men who have a reputation for being buttoned-up and emotionless, or Italian men who have a reputation for groping and molesting women in public, or Russian men who have a reputation for being violent drunks, or Frenchmen who have a reputation for smelling? “Argument From Rumor” does not impress.

The “culture war” is mostly a figment of our excited imaginations. In reality, secular interests are what they are, not crafted in opposition to the Christian menace.

Amen, Matt!

the difference between infant male circumcision and FGM.

Oh, that’s very simple. Male circumcision removes a useless external appendage and simplifies life a bit. Female genital mutilation removes what can only be considered vital internal tissue.

Very secondary to that, it is worth noting that FGM is not an integral ritual of ANY major religion, of ANY monotheistic faith. Muslims only practice it in regions where it was traditional prior to the advent of Islam. In some parts of east Africa, Christians from communities whose “local traditions” include FGM justify it as an expression of their Christian faith!

Traditionalists want to say that their main rallying call today (opposition to gay rights) is different from their rallying call of 50 years ago (opposition to racial minority rights).

Where shall I begin to count the fallacies in this deluded statement? What exactly is the meaning of “Traditionalists” — a definition so broad that each and every person who opposes “gay rights” opposed “racial minority rights” fifty years ago? Maybe what is “different” is the demographics of who is saying what about gay marriage, and who said what about Jim Crow?

I suppose Rod has fostered this delusion by reifying the term “Traditionalist” himself, but as there are an almost infinite number of “traditions” in the world, there are quite as many incarnations of “traditionalist.”

For that matter, what does “gay rights” consist of? And what are “racial minority rights”?

The Civil Rights movement was not about the rights of racial minorities. It was about the right of individuals NOT to be measured, primarily, by their race. “I just got off the bus and I need to find a restroom” is no longer met with “YOU PEOPLE use THAT one over there.”

Bobby is indulging both a straw man (The Traditionalists, or to borrow a phrase from Turmarion — who may not approve of how I use it — The eeeevul Traditionalists), and at the same time, a Conspiracy Theory about a vast cult with over fifty years of continuity.

Both Rod and Bobby overestimate the number of people willing to die on this hill. Go on up there and bay at the moon Bobby — most of us are enjoying ourselves down here in the valley living our lives, entirely unconcerned that some of our neighbors may be gay. We’re not peeking in anyone’s bedroom windows to inquire.

There was absolutely a media campaign in Germany, starting in the early 1900s, that prepared the way for the Holocaust by training the German people, slowly over time, to think of the Jews among them as alien contaminants.

No, that started early in the Holy Roman Empire.

“the thought of circumcision makes my skin crawl”

Really? I guess you never had one. What feels normal feels normal. The thought of having a foreskin makes MY skin crawl. Guess why? There are many, many decisions parents make for their children, and if one waits for the child to reach the age of reason, it is too late to go back and perform an immediate post-natal circumcision, should the child so choose. That really is the best time to do it.

Boys deserve the same protection as girls from forced genital cutting. Boys when they are adults should be allowed to make decisions about their body that are irreversible. I am happy to report that many Jews don’t circumcise and many are abandoning ritual circumcision. To my fellow Christians, I must warn you that American doctors are harming baby boys for profit. Google neonatal fibroblasts. I have joined with Intact America and numerous children’s rights advocates to protect babies from Routine Circumcision, a medically unnecessary surgery that is not recommended by any national medical organization. Google circumcision video. Everybody needs to see what baby boys are experiencing behind closed doors in a hospital circumcision room. Every year many boys in the U.S. and elsewhere lose their lives as a result of circumcision – a fact that has been routinely ignored or obscured until now. Google botched circumcisions and circumcision deaths. As Christians we are called upon to love, protect and nurture our children. The start of our son’s physical well being is better assured by saying NO to the pain, trauma, loss of sensitivity, and loss of intended protection caused by submitting him to an unnecessary, medically unjustified, routine circumcision that is not recommended.

As far as circumcision goes, for the Jewish people it is the outward sign of their singular Covenant with God, which is the very thing that defines them as a people. Maintaining their identity and covenant through the millennia, with and without political power and territory, has been literally an epic struggle. I reckon they’ll keep on for several more millennia, should God be so generous to grant the human race that. (And should we manage to not knock ourselves off.) If a country bans the practice, it will go under ground. If the sanctions are too high, they will move. Wouldn’t be the first time.

From a purely anthropological point of view, an outward sign of cultural identity by permanent physical alteration is not that rare. One that exacts such a high cost as circumcision can be expected to result in a high degree of cohesion and fidelity. That such a mark is made on a boy long before he has a say in the matter is a way to remind him of his cultural obligations for a lifetime despite countervailing pressures, and for the parents it is the first down payment on transmitting that culture. In short, it’s a form of commitment. I don’t want to go so far as support the type of thinking which encourages things like racial supremacy and ethnic cleansing, but there are certain cultural rights as well as individual rights. Something real is lost when a culture or language fades. And some cultures do exact a social cost on individuals. These costs SHOULD be weighed against individual rights, but cultural claims should not be taken lightly. They matter in their own right.

Circumcision is common enough among populations which are neither Jewish nor Muslim that it’s a bit surprising so much hell is being raised about it, really.

If you’re so concerned about what might happen, why do you not fight for the strongest possible protections — universal protections — for everyone? Is it the inevitability of your tribe eventually succumbing that lets you off the hook? Is it the pain of letting go of a few things that cause you to fail to protect the core?

There is no secularist consensus against circumcision, at all, let alone a consensus for a ban. If anyone can demonstrate that even a majority of secular people favor a ban on circumcision, I will…I don’t know what I’ll do, because I am just this side of certain that is not the case.

Rod — thank you for your response. And also thank you to Engineer Scotty for his thoughts. To me, this raises the key questions:

1. What actions are required, in your view, to avoid the oppression of traditionalist Christians?
2. Do those actions require or permit the oppression of others, such as homosexuals, single mothers, or others who transgress the sexual mores of traditionalist Christians?
3. Should the actions needed to avoid the oppression of traditionalist Christians be available on an equal basis to protect the religious or moral views of non-traditionalists?
4. (and perhaps the most important question) If the answers to these questions are in conflict, how and to what extent can they be reconciled?

“So true… Europeans implicitly seem to assume that if The State is not sponsoring an Established Church, then The State must have a policy of suppressing religion.”

A typical American urban legend. In what country?

Certainly not in Italy or France, which I know from direct experience. You have established religions (in theory) in many Northern Protestant countries (e.g Scandinavia), which generally speaking do not take religion very seriously to begin with and have semi-totalitarian social-democratic cultures. So, I have no idea what you guys are talking about. Germany?

Carlo, we have substantial population in the USA who fled Germany BECAUSE the state-sponsored Lutheran church was not adhering to what they considered the faith of their fathers. These are among the more conservative of our Protestant denominations, I don’t exactly agree with them on much, but they are a good example of the difference between freedom of religion and state sponsorship of True Faith.

I’m not reciting anything I read on some specific occasion, I’m offering my conclusion from several decades of reading about policy in Europe, and studying First Amendment jurisprudence in America. Perhaps if you “have no idea what you guys are talking about,” you should stop and think about it a little.

One relevant difference is than in certain European nations, and in Canada, people can be prosecuted for “hate speech” that in America is constitutionally protected. Since much of this speech is aligned with precepts that were legally enforced not too long ago, I have a sense that European governments think, e.g., EITHER homosexuality is a crime, or calling it sinful is a crime, but nobody seems able to conceptualize that one might think it sinful, but not a suitable subject for criminal prosecution, and others of your fellow citizens could disagree, and you could all live in the same country and speak your mind without rioting and demanding that someone or other be put in prison.

While France certainly has an extant Roman Catholic Church, and observant Jews, and a few Protestants who escaped the St. Bartholomen’s massacre and did not flee to Mississippi to become Blanch Du Bois’s ancestors… France does today have a militantly secularist tinge to its laws just as it once had a militantly Catholic tinge to its laws. Yes, there is some “toleration,” but that is a gift from the state, not a freedom from state jurisdiction.

is a perfect description of the traditional approach to homosexuality in southern countries like Italy or the Iberian peninsula even France. If anything, the idea of laws enforcing private morality is much more typical of countries coming from a Puritan tradition.

Re: There was absolutely a media campaign in Germany, starting in the early 1900s, that prepared the way for the Holocaust by training the German people, slowly over time, to think of the Jews among them as alien contaminants.

No, that started early in the Holy Roman Empire.

Longer ago than that, if we don’t limit ourselves to Germany. Anti-semitism predates Christianity and was alive and well among the Greeks and Romans (e.g., Antiochos Epiphanes, and for that matter Pontius Pilate)

[NFR: Perhaps, but there was a specific campaign that began in early 20th century Germany, with a growing interest in bodily hygiene. This moved on to thinking of the nation as a body; the eugenicists taught that the “unfit” were like contaminants preventing the body of the Volk from being healthy. You can see where that went. By the late 1920s, if memory serves, Jews were openly referred to in the media as like bacteria, vermin, and other contaminants. I saw a chilling and detailed exhibition on this at Yad Vashem. — RD]

“Boys deserve the same protection as girls from forced genital cutting. Boys when they are adults should be allowed to make decisions about their body that are irreversible.”

Is this really a widespread, serious concern or is it a somewhat fabricated one? I truly don’t know, but I do wonder how much time most men spend lamenting the fact that they were circumcised as a baby.

I am profoundly grateful to be living in a post-Chritian society and hope to enjoy a few more decades in it.

I think a more proper term is post-Christendom, but at any rate, I find a great deal of conceit and a sort of self-indulgence in today’s Christian persecution prophecies – a presumption that Christians must be at the center of an epic historical drama at all times. For adherents of this apocalyptic Christianity, largely socially conservative Catholics and Evangelicals, faith and private spiritual life are unsatisfying on their own terms. They seem to find no meaning in their religion unless they have the validation of being supreme victors or victims in the public arena.

I used to think the persecution myth was all about forging tribal bonds and raising cash, but I’ve come to believe a good many Christians would truly prefer martyrdom to the “indignity” of being just another demographic in live-and-let-live pluralism.

Get over yourselves, a little bit. Most of our secularist/pagans have much better things to do with our time than being your speech police, or banning circumcision, or whatever other conspiratorial “gay fascist/state atheism” agenda we’re supposed to be enforcing. All most of us have ever wanted was to get Christianity off our backs and out our pelvic regions and to get our government out of the doctrine enforcement business. We’ve won, give or take a few details which we’ll soon have sorted out.

We’re also tired of fighting, and we are, for the most part, ready to go back to the daily grind of just trying to get along in life and pay the bills, which is epic enough in my estimation. We’re not ever going to let you have reign over us again, but neither will we give you the satisfaction of pogroms and martyrdom. Life is short. Let’s all of us enjoy it and live it as we each think best.

Professor Emeritus Brian J Morris is perhaps the world’s most ardent advocate of universal infant circumcision. He has never seen a reason to cut a boy’s genitals he doesn’t like, including even to prevent “bathroom splatter” and zipper injury. He spins statistics like a dentist’s drill, extrapolating tiny non-random samples to the whole world at the drop of a scalpel. As usual he modestly fails to mention that he wrote most of his references himself. One he didn’t has a caveat about “the low quality of the existing evidence”, the other is an opinion piece from Israel.

Hector_St_Clare:
“The thought of circumcision” that “makes my skin crawl” is about the act of strapping a baby down and cutting off part of his genitals, often without anaesthetic. Your statement that “the idea of intact foreskins makes my skin crawl: I consider them gross, disgusting and a sign of barbarism” is an expression of bigotry against an inherent part of 2/3 of the men in the world, 2,000,000,000 of us, and including many men not generally considered barbarians, such as the Dalai Lama, Daniel Craig, Ronald Reagan and the Pope.

TTT
“No documented evidence”?
Taylor found a ridged band of highly innervated that runs round the inside of the foreskin near the tip, beginning and ending at the frenulum, which circumcised men (but only they) call “the male G-spot”.
Taylor, J.P., A.P. Lockwood and A.J.Taylor
The prepuce: Specialized mucosa of the penis and its loss to circumcision
Journal of Urology (1996), 77, 291-295

Sorrels et al found that “circumcision ablates [removes] the most sensitive part of the penis”
Sorrells ML, Snyder JL et al
Fine-touch pressure thresholds in the adult penis
BJU International 99 (4), 864-869

Frisch et al. found greater sexual problems in circumcised men and their partners than in intact men and theirs.
Frisch M, Lindholm M, Grønbæk M.
Male circumcision and sexual function in men and women: a survey-based, cross-sectional study in Denmark.
Int J Epidemiol. 2011 Jun 14.

(Professor Emeritus Morris says Frisch was “proved wrong” but only by Professor Emeritus Morris himself, who also worked behind the scenes to prevent his work being published.)

Any intact man who has considered the matter (and many never need to) can tell you that his foreskin is vital to his full sexual functioning. Men circumcised in adulthood compare the difference to going colourblind – a difference of quality, not quantity, that infant-circumcised men can never comprehend.

[NFR: And if people don’t have “full sexual function,” their lives are without meaning? To not circumcise would mean abandoning the ritual that signifies a male’s Jewishness. What a tragedy to decide that having a more intense orgasm is more important than keeping the covenant. — RD]

Pro circers and religionists let’s be clear: no one wants to ban circumcision. All that Intactivists seek is that it be age restricted. When one turns 18 one should be able to do with his/her body exactly as they please. Simple as that.

Just how would age-regulated boy circumcision make life so difficult for those who want it? In the US we have regulated by legislation and/or judicial decree whether 1)Appalachian snake-handling sects can involve children under 18 in their essential, core ritual; 2) Jehovah’s Witnesses can violate child labor laws by involving their young children in handing out pamphlets; 3)JWs can deny life-saving blood transfusions to their children; 4)Christian Science and like-minded religions can deny crucial, life-saving medical treatment for their children. None of those sects have disappeared because of it, and some of them remain alive and well enough to keep knocking on my door with great regularity. One must distinguish religious belief and/or advocacy from religious activity on the other hand.

And this: Shall we now protect the rights of religious groups to the exclusion of the personal (including religious) rights of individuals who may not want to ever be in a group, or who have affirmatively left a group? Do children have human rights? Or are they chattel property of their parents?

“let’s be clear: no one wants to ban circumcision. All that Intactivists seek is that it be age restricted. When one turns 18 one should be able to do with his/her body exactly as they please. Simple as that.”

How many 18-year-old and older males do you think would ever decide to undergo circumcision?

I do not support making illegal the circumcision of minors. It if is made illegal, there should be a religious exemption. I would not stand in the way of a law that required that all circumcisions be performed under anesthesia, by a qualified urologist. I write as I do here as a pragmatist, and not as a moral absolutist. I also agree with those who hae argued above that freedom or religion in the USA is not quite absolute.

I do not agree that banning infant circumcision would make impossible the practice of Judaism and Islam. In Islam, male circumcision is only a tradition; the Koran is silent about circumcision. Islamic circumcision came about more than 1000 years before soap, running water and sewers were ever thought of. Given present day standards of hygiene, Islam may yet dispense with circumcision. Given how lax most Jews have become about most aspects of the Torah, would it really be the end of the world if brit milah took place some time between the 21st birthday and the announcement of one’s engagement?

Whether infant circumcision affects adult sexual pleasure and function is an empirical matter that has never been carefully studied using a large stratified random sample of American and Canadian men, and their sexual partners. (Francophone Canadians are a large block of middle class intact men.) In the absence of studies, we cannot assert that circumcision is harmless. There is ample anecdotal evidence that circumcision can detract from adult sex for one or both genders. This effect varies widely by individual, age and partner. There are reports of occasional disasters; should we simply ignore them? Should we circumcise, knowing that the outcome for, say, 0.1% will be chronic adult impotence? For, say, 15% of men, a hard driving style of intercourse that is off-putting to women? That, say, 5% of women complain of chronic pain and friction from circumcised partners?

To surrender part of one’s sexuality out of deference to divine will and out of loyalty to one’s human tribe, can be a moral, even noble, act. To deprive another person of the same faculties by force, when they are too young to resist, comprehend or make an informed choice, is neither moral nor noble. I am confident that Islam and most forms of Judaism can cross this bridge.

I have joined with Intact America and numerous children’s rights advocates to protect babies from Routine Circumcision

How arrogantly self-righteous and condescending of you. You would, ex post facto, deny me the body I am comfortable with, inflicting upon me all kinds of extra daily sanitary procedures, just so you can be satisfied that my parents and pediatrician didn’t “impose” anything on me against my unformed will.

Look people, parents make ALL KINDS of decisions for and about children. There is no way to get around that. It is both impossible and undesirable to establish an iron clad right to have NOTHING done by parental choice until a person is 18. Once I was 18, it would have been too late to decide that I want to have been circumcised at the age of five days — which is by far the better time to perform the operation. YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO FORCE A BABY TO WAIT UNTIL IT IS 18 AND THEN MAKE A DECISION.

YOU CAN’T RESERVE EVERY DECISION UNTIL A PERSON REACHES THE AGE OF MAJORITY. To do so is to impose your own personal view of what is best upon both parents and children. If I have a son, I will have him circumcised (subject to concurrence of his mother), because I appreciate having been able to live my entire conscious life without worrying about a darn foreskin.

“And this: Shall we now protect the rights of religious groups to the exclusion of the personal (including religious) rights of individuals who may not want to ever be in a group, or who have affirmatively left a group? Do children have human rights? Or are they chattel property of their parents?”

Forgive me, that’s completely silly as far as circumcision goes. The idea that because parents are entitled to introduce children to their religious tradition (including a completely minor action like circumcision), therefore children are their “chattel property” is a complete non sequitur.

By your logic, parents should not decide whether to have their children vaccinated, whether to go to Church, and so on. There is a difference between being “chattel property” and receiving your life from your parents. The abstract idea that a human being can be an independent individual and make all his/her decision autonomously is pure folly. Some of our most important decisions are taken by others, including the very decision that we are alive. And the language we speak, and the culture in which we participate. In comparison, the decision of having a foreskin or not is completely trivial.

on further reflection, I think you are an hypocrite. Because, by setting the rights of children in opposition to the rights of their parents, what you really achieve (aware or unaware) is making childen “chattel property” of the state (through public education, the mass media and all the other means of social indoctrination that will decide for them what to think and what to do, once the children are not rooted in any tradition).

There is nothing more liberating that being rooted in a tradition that frees you from the pressures of the power that be in any given historical time. That’s what people like you want to destroy.

What extra burdens are these? Retracting your foreskin to urinate thrice a day and then rolling it back when done? Do you imagine men with foreskins wash themselves in a sink with soap and hot water after peeing or something?

Nobody is going to staple a foreskin on to you now (unless you want it)! No scientific studies have been done – some should – but informal polls suggest that intact men are more more likely (by about 19:1) to be comfortable with their bodies than circumcised men (by about 11:9) with theirs. So if you want a man to be comfortable with his body, the chances are much higher if you don’t cut part off his penis.

The decision to cut off a normal, healthy, functional, non-renewing part of a child’s body is not like other decisions parents make for children, nor is it “every decision”. In fact it’s not legal to cut ANY such part off a girl, nor any other such part off a boy, nor to tattoo a child, nor to pierce her or his genitals – nor even to circumcise a domestic pet! Why is it open slather on infant human male foreskins alone?

Nobody is “setting the rights of children in opposition to the rights of their parents”, merely asserting that children’s rights are human rights (because children are human). There is no inherent right to cut parts off children. (And please spare us “nails and hair” etc. You know they grow back.) Circumcision has its main effect not on children but adults, and it is those adults’ human rights not to have had parts removed from their bodies without their consent (lacking pressing medical need) that are at issue here.

“a tradition that frees you from the pressures of the power that be in any given historical time”
And having had part of your genitals cut off by the (local) power-that-be frees you from those pressures how?

Carlo, maybe I should have been a bit clearer. I am from and still live in Sweden. You will need more than a column in the Guardian to convince me. Especially when a lot of what is written in it is nonsense. But for your information I can tell you that swedes do not frown upon crying on funerals, I have cried on everyone I have attended, women do not strive to be silent during childbirth and we do not do everything we can to avoid ridning in elevators with strangers. It is true that swedes are more private compared to people in many other countries and that visitors can find this rude when they come to Sweden. But these kind of differences between cultures and regions are hardly uncommon. See finns compared to swedes, britts and germans compared to spanish and italians and so on.

Also, while the socialdemocratic party dominated swedish political life for large parts of the last century, they often cooperated with other parties to implement their reforms, and we still had free and fair elections, free press, low corruption, high trust in goverment and so on. To vaguely speak about curbed freedoms, crushed dissent, severing of family ties and calling Sweden “the China of the north”, is absurd.

All this is ofcourse very common when you read about Sweden in english speaking media. Sweden is usually either an utopia or dystopia, very seldom a country struggeling with many of the same problems that other countries struggle with in the west.

Nobody who shares our consern about nontherapeutic child circumcision suggesting that human rights do not include the right to worship as one sees fit. Rather there is a conflict between an adults right to manifest his religious belief and the rights of the child to privacy, dignity and freedom from cruel, inuman or degrading treatment. These rights are all protected by the European Convention on human rigts but only the right to LIfe (ECHR 2) and the right to protectionf from cruel, inuman or degrading treatment. or punishment (ECHR 3) are qualified rights.

The right to manifest religious belief is protected by ECHR 9(1) but ECHR 9(2)n provides the qualification that the right to manifest religious belief may be limited to protect the rights and freadoms of others. In the case of child circumcision, removing a part of a child’s genitals infringes is privacy and arguably amounts to cruel inhuman treatment, – particularly if performed without an anaesthetic. As such, the ECHR is clear that the adults right to manifest religious belief may be limited to protect the rights of the child. There is absolutely nothing to stop attendance at Synnagogue or Mosque. There is nothing to prevent prayer or educationing children in the way of the religion. Indeed there is nothing to stop an adult electing circumcision as a statement of his religious faith. Cutting off part of a child’s genitals is a step too far.

It is unfortunate that present moves in Scandinavia are construed as an attempt “to ban non-therapeutic circumcision of boys” and not merely as an age restriction. Everyone has a right to decide for themselves which body modifications they undergo and circumcision should be left until they are of sufficient age and maturity to decide for themselves.

Isn’t it weird that so many men who wholeheartedly accept the idea that wearing a condom reduces sensation and makes sex less enjoyable by covering sensitive areas refuse to even consider the possibility that removing sensitive areas would also reduce sensation?

I fully accept that circumcision can, and probably does reduce sensation. As a circumcised guy, I have to say I don’t feel all that disadvantaged. Maybe it’s like the venerable Don Rumsfeld said: “We don’t know what we don’t know”! Even in my potentially “diminished” state, it’s still pretty damn good, and I shudder to think what might happen if it was a lot better. I’d never get anything else done!

I just don’t see male circumcision as the great human rights issue of our time. On the other hand, I do see the overall point of its opponents. It’s medically unnecessary, there is a consent issue, and it is a form of mutilation, however minor it may (or may not) be. The overwhelming percentage of circumcisions have nothing to do with religion, only cultural inertia. If we’re going to hold that parental preference and even religion should end the discussion, try to step outside of the problem and look at it from another direction. If parents started performing Prince Albert piercings on their infant boys for tribal or religious or aesthetic reasons, would you still be okay with that, or would you be on the phone to the child welfare agency that day?

As a someone who just had his newborn son circumcised two weeks ago (for purely medical reasons, nothing to do with religion as I am neither Jewish nor Muslim), I find much of the “intactivist” focus on newborn pain to be exaggerated. My son gave no indication of pain or distress 5 minutes after being circumcised. I bet that he’d have much more pain later in life when he had a penile infection of UTI.

I’m not exactly “pro” circumcision, but I am surprised by the fanaticism of some of the “intactivists.”

l”l most of us have ever wanted was to get Christianity off our backs and out our pelvic regions and to get our government out of the doctrine enforcement business. We’ve won, give or take a few details which we’ll soon have sorted out.”

Christianity id to blame for . . .

So if upon discovery that some secular or pagan member has had relations with someone who knew they had some illness and subsequently is infected, the secularist or pagan will throw up their hands and expect that no action be taken.

That women will no longer expect government to take up the cause of their contraception . . they will take responsibility for their choice to have relations and having gotten pregnant will no longer expect the state to provide any level of care – they will be responsible for the consequences of their behavior.

That the public education system will not promote in any manner educating youth on such matters pertaining to their pelvic area.

That all public funded for rehab of any kind will cease as everyone then becomes responsible for their behavior. Public funding for planned parenthood concerned with all manner of pelvic behavior will no longer be supported by tax dollars —

This statement is already a fallacy. Worshiping by cutting off parts of the body of another person is an obvious intrusion on the other person’s right. The fact that the other person happens to be a baby, and your son, only makes it worse, as it becomes ritual child abuse.

Wycoff: “My son gave no indication of pain or distress 5 minutes after being circumcised.”
No, they commonly go into neurogenic shock, as you would if you had a fingertip cut off without anaesthetic.

“I bet that he’d have much more pain later in life when he had a penile infection of UTI.”
– with a likelihood of 1 in 100 (3 in 100 girls). His likelihood of the pain of being circumcised, once you’d decided to do it, was 100%

“I’m not exactly “pro” circumcision…”
Didn’t you just say you’d had it done to your son? How much more “pro” do you need to be?
“…but I am surprised by the fanaticism of some of the “intactivists.”
Well we haven’t flown any planes into buildings yet, but in 1995 a very zealous Intactivist took a Circumstraint(TM) from a hospital (in the cause of parents and doctors doing nothing, leaving babies’ genitals alone).

Fanatacism? Have a look at the determination some people, organisations and even governments have, to go on cutting babies’ genitals!